GlycoCT

GlycoCT is a standardized, machine-readable representation for carbohydrate structures (glycans) designed to enable unambiguous data exchange, storage, and computational analysis in glycobiology. It provides a formal description of glycan topology and composition that can be interpreted by software across databases and analysis tools. A GlycoCT description encodes each monosaccharide residue with an identifying type and, when relevant, properties such as stereochemistry, ring form, and substitutions. It also specifies the glycosidic linkages that connect residues, including donor and acceptor residues, linkage positions, and anomeric configurations. The representation supports branched structures and complex post-synthetic modifications, which are common in biological glycans.

GlycoCT is available in several serialized forms, including detailed and condensed variants, with tooling to parse, validate, and convert between formats. The standard is designed to be both human-readable and machine-parseable, facilitating manual curation as well as automated processing. It is widely used in the glycoinformatics community for exchanging data between databases, software applications, and research workflows.

Adoption and use: GlycoCT strings are used by major glycan resources and analytical tools, notably in data exchange with GlyTouCan and related platforms, as a basis for structure search, annotation, and computational modeling. The format promotes interoperability with other glycan representations and supports reproducible computational analyses.